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One of the first computers I was ever allowed to use all on my own was a superannuated ICL-1901A, controlled from a Teletype Model 33.

One of the processor’s address lines was wired up to a speaker inside the teletype, producing an audible click every time that address bit changed.

The idea was that you could, quite literally, listen to your code running.

Loops, in particular, tended to produce recognisable patterns of sound, as the program counter iterated over the same set of memory adresses repeatedly.

This was a great help in debugging – you could count your way through a matrix multiplication, for instance, and keep track of how far your code ran before it crashed.

You could even craft your loops (or the data you fed into them) to produce predictable frequencies for predictable lengths of time, thus producing vaguely tuneful – and sometimes even recognisable – musical output.

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Earlier this year, we reported that any computer infected with a nasty piece of malware could be shunned from using the Internet by the feds. The deadline for that was March 8 but an extension was ordered to provide users with more time to clean up computers. Now, Federal Bureau of Investigation has said all must be virus free by July 9 or be subject to was PC World calls “Internet doomsday.”

The malware is a piece called DNS Changer Trojan that was the work of six men from Estonia who were arrested and charged in 2011. The malware infected more than 4 million computers in 100 countries and is relatively easy to spread, hence why the government is ready to stop those with the virus from accessing the Internet.

Individuals and companies have been working to scrub the malware from their systems but as of March at least one computer in half of all Fortune 500 companies was infected and more than two dozen government agencies had a carrier as well. PC world reports that estimates are more than 350,000 computers are still infected. Read more…

Identifying people by acquiring pictures of their eyes is becoming easier, according to a new report* from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). NIST researchers evaluated the performance of iris recognition software from 11 different organizations and found that some techniques produced very rapid results—though this speed was often at the cost of accuracy.

According to a NIST report, software that identifies people based on scans of the iris, the ‘colored’ part of the eye that surrounds the pupil, can produce very rapid results, but this speed is often at the cost of accuracy.

Credit: Talbott/NIST

Iris recognition, a form of biometric identification based on noncontact imaging of the complex texture in an individual’s iris, has been purported to be both fast and accurate—claims that had not been validated until now. The Iris Exchange (IREX) III report is the first public and independent comparison of commercially available algorithms that use iris recognition for the challenging task of finding an individual match within a large database of potential identities. Previous published studies only used single algorithms or considered “one-to-one” verification, in which an Read more…

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An X-ray shows one of the patients in the study with electrodes all over their brain (Pic: Adeen Flinker/UC Berkeley)

Computer Program to Read Human Thoughts! A research that appeared recently in the journal PLoS Biology has revealed about a way of using a computer program to help read a person’s brain and then put the findings into words.

A group of neuroscientists at the University of California Berkeley said that the technique could be beneficial for patients who have speech impairment or are affected by stroke and degenerative disease. The research is said to be capable of taking mind reading to a new level.

In order to reach at the conclusion, the study researchers conducted an experiment in which they enrolled brain surgery patients. They inserted electrodes in the skulls of the patients and connected them with a computer program. They did it so they could know the working of temporal lobe which is associated with the processing of speech and images.

It was revealed that the computer program was successful in analyzing the brain and could also reproduce the Read more…

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Cybercrime cost corporations 56 percent more this year than last, according to an annual study from the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by ArcSight, an HP company.

“Cybercrimes can do serious harm to an organization’s bottom line,” said the study, which found that the median cost related to cybercrime to the 50 companies in the survey was $5.9 million.

Larry Ponemon, founder and chairman of the Traverse, Mich., company that bears his name, told PCWorld there have been several root causes for the bump up in the cost of cyber crime. “Sophisticated stealthy types of cyber crime are happening more frequently,” he said.

When the study was done last year, he explained, more visible forms of cybercrime dominated the Read more…